


Oh brother, brother, rest your head on me

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TV 2003)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Broken Bones, Brotherly Affection, Brotherly Love, Family Dynamics, Gen, Good Older Sibling Leonardo (TMNT), Hurt Raphael, Protective Raphael, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 05:32:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19311652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: Leo has always known that Raph will live and die for his family and that underneath all that anger he carried deep in his soul was a heart of gold that only beats for his brothers. And Leo has always known him better than anyone else, so when he does something brutal and fights with their Sensei to defend his littlest brother's honour, Leo knows just where to find him and just what to say.





	Oh brother, brother, rest your head on me

**Author's Note:**

> I'm actually really proud of this one. The tagging was a tiny bit difficult because even though all the brothers are in it, the story is mostly between Raph and Leo, so I wasn't sure if I should tag the relationships Leo & Don & Raph & Mikey or just as Leo & Raph, as well as the characters as the same thing, but I settled for what I did and I hope it was the right one. I still don't quite understand this tagging thing haha. I'm very bad at it. 
> 
> This is just a fic of Raph being the over-protective big brother that we all know he is, Mikey being the darling he was born to be, Donnie trying his best and Leo being the best big brother anyone could ask for. Master Splinter is talked about but not in this because he's super hard to write haha.
> 
> Let me know if you like it because I'm honestly really pleased with the way this turned out- all of it from beginning to end, which is new. I haven't written many fics for 2003 lately (or any TMNT at all, for that matter) and I've got a month long of holidays so hopefully, I'll be able to bang some things out to the best standard that I can.

It had been a too-long while since Leo had felt the kind of peace and tranquillity he was experiencing as he sat in the isolating yet comfortable silence of the dojo, his body folded and his mind open to everything and nothing all at the same time. Oh, how he had missed it. There was nothing- absolutely nothing, that could possibly ruin the moment for him-

A heavy hand shoved him to the side and not expecting it, Leo rolled onto his shell. It took a moment for him to return to himself, but he dimly heard shouting, and he braced himself to be met with the familiar visual of an enraged Raph here to yell at him for something or other, but he was not expecting Donnie to be in his face with wide eyes, waving his arms about. “Come on, Leo!” He was saying now that Leo could hear him. “There’s no way you missed all of that and _now_ can’t hear a word I’m saying. Are you ignoring me? Is this how Raph feels on a regular basis? Because if it is, I _completely_ understand.”

Leo blinked the left-over sleepiness from his eyes and was almost immediately alert. “Whoa, sorry Don. I was in deep that time. What’s wrong?”

His brother seemed to relax, if only slightly, and he helped Leo stand with an offered arm. “Sorry I pushed you. I’ve just uh… I’ve been standing here for a while and I guess I just got a little desperate.”

“No worries,” Leo said. “What was so important that you couldn’t wait for another hour to talk to me about?”

Donnie shot a worried glance towards the area they had dubbed the living room where Mikey’s frantic, high pitched voice floated through the thin walls and into the dojo, and Leo felt himself instantly go cold with worry. “It’s Raph. He got into a fight with Master Splinter and stormed off. We don’t know where he went, but he’s been gone a while, and he was hurt when he left.”

“Wait- what?” Leo didn’t think could be more confused if Donnie had just backhanded him in the face with the end of his bo. “And none of you thought to go after him?” He pushed past Donnie and made his way into the living room where Mikey was bouncing on the back of the couch, both hands clutched to the side of his head, Krunk meowing pitifully on the table.

Rushing after him, Donnie felt himself getting involuntarily annoyed. “You’re the one who always tells us to give him space. We thought that he would come back when he had cooled down enough, but after the first hour and a half without him showing up, Master Splinter went after him and now they’re both gone so I had to get you.”

Catching sight of them, Mikey stopped bouncing on the back of the couch and leapt down to the floor, running towards his brothers. “Oh my god, Leo, where have you been, man? What do we do? Raph’s just totally lost it and Master Splinter told us to stay here but we can’t just leave him alone out there, can we?”

Both of his brothers looked so worried and so lost that Leo actually felt it deep within his soul, and Donnie wasn’t fazed by much and yet he looked as though he had just been woken up by a very vivid and bloody nightmare. If he was being honest with himself, Leo was just as worried as they were if not more, but being the leader and the oldest sibling meant that he had to keep it together despite how badly his insides roiled. “It’ll be alright. You guys stay here, I’ll go and see if I can find him. I’ll bring my shell-cell, so you give me a ring if either one of them comes back.”

Donnie looked frantic, but he bit the inside of his cheek and pointed near the exit to the lair, where his heavy over-the-shoulder bag was lying on a table cluttered with spare parts and tools. “Take my bag- it’s already stocked up with bandages and first aid supplies from our last patrol. I’m not sure how badly he was hurt before he left, so you might have to take care of him before he can get back to me.”

Nodding, Leo patted him on the shoulder before passing them completely, grabbing the over-worn brown bag on his way out of the lair. He only let down his façade of calm when the big alien-like doors sealed shut behind him.

Raph running off to cool down from a fight wasn’t unusual, the fight being with Master Splinter in the first place was what made Leo worried, plus the fact that their father had thought the situation bad enough to leave their lair and go after him himself. Hopefully, their Sensei would be back home by the time Leo caught up to Raph, so he could talk to his brother alone.

As he ran through the sewers, Don’s bag an unfamiliar but not uncomfortable weight on his shoulders, he ran past all the childhood memories his siblings had scratched and painted and scarred into the walls, from mostly-empty cans of spray paint that they had used to crudely graffiti their names or the first time Leo and Raph had been given actual sharp weapons and they had spent hours swinging at the walls in glee until their father had caught them and scolded them for running off and for dulling the blades. Their whole lives had been lived in the confines of the sewers, from their childhood to their adolescence all the way to this very moment, which is why Leo knew exactly where his brother would be.

His diligence was rewarded once he had climbed the ladder and shimmied out the drainage pipe that led to a secluded section of the beach, only to see Raph down below, nearest to the water, pacing a hole in the sand and clutching at himself like that was the only thing he could think of to do with his anger. Leo watched him for a moment, observing the kind of condition he was in and what the best way to approach him was before he leapt down off the pipe and landed on the sand, foregoing the ladder completely. “Raph.”

Raph spun like an angry tiger, sand spitting up under his heels, his hands fisted at his sides. “What?” He snapped, and while Leo was used to the ire there, he was not used to the underlying emotions that he couldn’t really identify. “Did pops send you to talk some sense into me? Tell me that I’m over-reacting and I deserve whatever punishment you’re going to give me?  To drag me back home? Well, I’m telling you right now Leo, I’m not doing it.”

Slightly startled, Leo held his hands up in surrender and took a step back to give Raph some more space. “Raph, calm down. I don’t know what’s going on. Donnie came and got me and told me that you got into a fight with Master Splinter and stormed out. I came to make sure everything was alright. I'm not here to drag anyone back to anywhere.”

Panting, Raph’s fists didn’t unclench but the fury with which he was looking at Leo subsided a little. “So you’re telling me that nobody sent you to bring me back?”

Leo gestured out at the waves gently lapping against the shore. “You can stay out here as long as you want. It’s the city where I worry. The only person who told me to come here was me, but Donnie wanted me to check up on you. He said you got hurt.” He tapped the heavy bag on his shoulder that was starting to get borderline uncomfortable. “So if you don’t mind me staying here for a bit, I’d like to take this thing off. It’s really heavy.” Raph looked suspicious but nodded and Leo quickly took it off his shoulder. He breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks. I don’t know how Donnie does it all the time. It’s heavy than you think.”

“What are you doing here, Leo?” Raph wasn’t looking at Leo anymore, but out at the distance, where the sea was colliding against itself with a roar of white foam and crashing waves.

Instead of immediately answering, Leo joined Raph at where the sea met the shore and watched with him. Raph gave him a moment. “I’ve come to make sure my brother is alright. You’ve got a temper, sure, but it’s not like you to just storm out like you did, especially after a fight with dad. I’ve come to see if you wanted to talk about it. Sure, I’m no Donnie, but I guess you’ll just have to make do.”

“Why the hell would I want to talk about anything? I don’t have anything to talk about.” Raph’s voice was gruff and that would usually signal the end of the conversation, but there was still that underlying _something_ that told Leo that there was actually more than meets the eye.

Shrugging, Leo fiddled with his belt as he kept his eyes on the waves. “Alright. Well, I guess I’ll just stand here and watch the waves if it’s all the same to you.”

Raph grunted and stepped to the side so Leo could more fully join him closer to the water, and they just stood there, shoulder to shoulder, in comfortable silence. Leo knew his brother like he knew the hilt and blade of his katana, and he knew without a shadow of a doubt that the best way to get Raph to talk about what he was keeping pent up inside was to let him get it out himself on his own time, so Leo waited. Good thing that patience was one of his strongest attributes.

Leo felt a faint vibration against his side and he took his shell-cell out of his belt to check the message that had come through. It was from Mikey and it read, ‘ _Sensei’s home, he didn’t bring Raph. Donnie is making him a cup of tea before bed.’_ Leo acknowledged it silently and put it away before Raph could notice.

Staying as still as he could while the waves washed over his toes, Leo waited with all the patience he could muster until Raph ultimately growled low in his throat and kicked at the sand, sending a heavy spray of grain to be washed away by the water. “It’s all just so _stupid,_ and I _know_ I should have let it go but it just made me so god damn _angry_ that I couldn’t walk away and…”

“Hey, that’s alright,” Leo placed a hand on Raph’s shoulder and he tensed but didn’t pull away. “You can talk to me. I’m sure you had a reason. You always have a reason. It might not be the smartest or most sensible one, but you always have one.”

Talking a deep, calming breath, Raph shook his head a few times as if to clear his mind, teeth grit. “I was coming home from Casey’s, and yeah, I know you don’t like me getting involved with anything when I’m alone, but I was hiding in the shadows like I always do when I heard these little _punks_ talking about us,” Leo frowned but Raph obviously had more to say so he just kept his mouth shut. “And you know I couldn’t care less what people think of us because I know that we do good work, but I just listened to them for a bit, you know? Wanted to hear what the new word on the street about us was. And they started talking about how cool we are and how they like watching us jump over rooftops and beat up the Foot and other rival gangs like Hun and his Purple Dragons. And I felt proud, you know? Proud that someone finally appreciated us for what we did and who they were, even if it was a couple of street rats, and I was about to leave when…” He took a deep, seething breath. “Then they started talking smack about Mikey.”

Tilting his head, Leo tried to think of what they could possibly say about their little brother to get Raph so riled up, but couldn’t really think of anything. “About Mikey in particular? What the hell were they saying?”

“That he sucked and he weak and that he was no point to us as a team because he was useless,” Raph was getting angrier and angrier with every word he spoke and Leo knew what all this anger was building up to, so he took his hand from his shoulder and instead he reached down and gripped Raph’s hands in his so he couldn’t hurt himself. “And you know that I’m usually pretty good at ignoring things like that, but damn it, Leo, it’s been a bad day and that’s my little brother.”

“Hey, hey, you don’t have to justify yourself to me. I understand.” Leo did understand because he could already feel the rage boiling up inside him just hearing the words being said second-hand, he could only imagine what Raph must have felt. “What did you do? Because I know you, and I know you wouldn’t have just walked away and left it.”

Raph growled deep in his throat. “Of course I didn’t. That’s my little brother they were talking about.” For the first time, Leo noticed that one of the hands held between his was trembling. Just one. “I jumped out from where I was hiding and punched him in the face. I told him that if he ever talked about Mikey about that again, then he was going to get much more than a broken nose. And then I left. That’s all.”

“That’s all?” Leo said, incredulous. “Breaking someone’s nose isn’t nothing, Raph. You know we have a code that we work by and injuring people outside of combat doesn’t follow along those lines.”

“He just made me so damn mad, Leo,” Raph snapped but Leo was thankful that his brother's anger wasn’t directed at him yet. Under Leo’s hand, something shifted, and he frowned down at it in confusion. “What if they were talking smack about Donnie? Would you let it slide? Because we both know that people do and Donnie knows it too. He just lives his life like it doesn’t bother him and pretends that nothing can touch him, that he’s above what other people think of him to protect himself. But Mikey isn’t like that. He’s soft and gentle and innocent. He looks after his cat more than he looks after himself. You know that if he had heard that, he wouldn’t have spoken to any of us for weeks. You know that I couldn’t have just let that stand.”

“I understand, but you shouldn’t have acted without thinking like that. You know better.” Leo said, trying to be gentle but when he squeezed his brother's hand in a comforting way, Raph winced slightly and looked away and Leo felt a lightbulb go off in his head as his heart sank. “Donnie said he thought you were injured when you left. You didn’t…”

“Break my hand?” Raph replied with grit teeth and a broken, airy laugh. “Yeah.”

Leo yanked his hands away so fast that he could almost hear the high-pitched sound of the air rushing past and over his knuckles. Raph let out a breath and cradled his hand to his chest, the one that was trembling and shifting under Leo’s fingers. “God damn it, Raph, why the hell didn’t you say something?” Leo pushed past Raph to snatch the bag up off the sand and yank open the zipper, pulling out bandages and Band-Aids and loose medical supplies that Donnie had chucked in without a chance to organise it.

Holding his hand protectively against his chest, Raph watched Leo approach him with the bag and reluctantly let his brother take over. “I forgot about it when I left the lair, and it didn’t seem like such a big deal until you tried to crush my hand.”

Seething as Leo pulled his hand away from his chest, Raph glowered as Leo began to assess the damage. “I wouldn’t have squeezed it if I had known that it was _broken_ ,” he tutted as he slowly turned his brothers chafed and calloused hand over in his own. “Why didn’t you tell me it was hurting?”

“We were having such a moment, I didn’t want to ruin it,” he joked but flinched when Leo held it tighter to apply some cream and tightly-wound bandages. “Ow! You know it’s broken now, no need for you to be so rough.”

“That’s what you get for being a smartass,” Leo said a little smugly as he began to wrap the bandages a little loser and Raph seemed to relax because of it. They stood there silently for a while, the waves lapping at their toes with Raph’s hands held in his older brothers while Leo diligently took care of him. It was only when Leo had completely finished wrapping Raph’s hand that he spoke. “I don’t blame you, you know. I would never admit it in front of anyone else, but you did the right thing. I probably would have done it too.”

With a raised brow, Raph gave him an odd look. “You? Mister ‘calm-and-composed’?”

Leo shrugged. “I can meditate every day of every week, but that won’t stop me from getting mad at someone for picking on my little brother. I get mad when you do it, why wouldn’t I get mad at random people we usually take the time out of our nights to beat the asses of?”

“I can make fun of Mikey because he’s my little brother.” Raph pointed out. “But he’s _my_ little brother. I wasn’t just going to stand back while these jerks on the street made fun of someone they didn’t even know. What’s next? Saying that Donnie might as well stay home? What the hell do they know?”

“It doesn’t matter, because we know differently, don’t we?” Leo said. He was glad to see that his brother was steadily calming down and that his wrath was more or less gone. Now they were just having a regular, if surprisingly calm, conversation. “We know more about Mikey than those fools could ever know.”

Huffing, Raph kicked at the sand again and it went skidding across the water. “I know, but still, we shouldn’t have to listen to that crap. They can say what they want about me, but I won’t let them talk like that about Mike. And who the hell knows what’ll happen if he hears it.”

“Well, once word gets around about what happened tonight, I doubt that anyone will be talking like that about Mikey for a long time,” Leo laughed, clapping his brother on the shoulder and turning him around so his shell faced the sea. “Are you ready to go home? Because I know I am.”

Sighing, Raph nodded and began walking towards the ladder that led up to the large drainage pipe. “Yeah. I think I need a nap. Like I said- it’s been a bad day.” He paused to Leo let collect Donnie’s bag and sling it over his shoulder. “What are you going to do when we get back?”

Once again, Leo grunted under the weight of Donnie’s bag, not so much that he lost his balance, but he made a mental note to bring it up with Don. “First I’m going to let Master Splinter know that you’re ok,” he said and he watched Raph flinch. “And not to go too rough on you, if he decides to give you a punishment, but I don’t think he will.  And then I’m going to return to my meditation, which I was doing when I was rudely interrupted by Don shoving me over onto my shell.”

“Don?” Raph chuckled incredulously. “I wish I had been there to see that.”

As Leo was helping his brother up the ladder, a sudden thought struck him, and he had no choice but to laugh out loud, a deep rumbling laugh that shook through him and apparently into his brother because Raph looked down to glare at him. “What the hell are you laughing at? Is helping me too much of a burden to you?”

“I can’t believe you broke your hand by punching a dude in the face.”

“Shut up, Leo.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not going to lie, the part about meditating was the hardest bit for me to write 😅
> 
> I know some people are going to get mad at me but I had to include Don because he's just the best and I had to include Mikey because the image of him jumping on the back of the couch like that was just too good to pass up.


End file.
